Interview with Mark Clifton, Founder and CEO of Front Row Labs

Mark Clifton is currently the Founder and CEO of Front Row Labs. Quoted from their website, “We help innovators innovate and companies succeed. We’re revolutionizing the way businesses grow and thrive. We have three lines of business - a success catalyst program an innovation center and an alternative workspace - that help great ideas come to life”. Clifton was formerly the President of Products and Solutions at SRI International, the CEO and President of Princeton Identity.

Rana Myneni: You’re currently the CEO and founder of Front Row Labs. What was your vision when you first started there?

Mark Clifton: The idea is that about 80-90% of startups fail, so if an entrepreneur has a good idea, he might raise a little bit of money, but his chances of success are very small if you just look at the numbers. So if you’re an investor sitting across the table from a startup who’s asking for money, and you know that 9 times out of 10 this person’s going to fail, what kind of investment is that, right? What we thought when we put the concept, the hypothesis, together was that if we could go in and change that number to make it so that less than 50% would fail, then we could change that number by doing what? We could change that number by providing the capabilities that startups don’t have when they start. They typically have a good idea, and they might understand the market to some level, but they don’t necessarily have all the services they need, and they don’t necessarily know how to execute on the vision that they have. So our idea was to go in and help them succeed, that was really what we are trying to do, and try to bend the curve of the failure rate.

RM: What are some of those specific steps and measures, and overall support systems, that Front Row Labs has to help innovators and entrepreneurs?

MC: We have a CTO; a chief technology officer; we have a CHRO, a chief human resources officer; we have a CFO, a chief financial officer; and I’m the CEO; so we have a suite of C-level players that have a lot of experience. We’re all experienced professionals, we’ve all had various different careers- some with large companies, some with small companies, some with startups, some with not- it just depends on which person we’re talking about, but to provide that experience basically all directly for a startup was the big idea.

RM: You were pretty instrumental in R&D at SRI International and Princeton Identity. What has your journey been like in innovation?

MC: Two different journeys, because Princeton Identity was a spinout, a startup, and SRI is a well-established company (it was Sarnoff in Princeton before that), so a long, storied history of research and technology development. I also in my past have worked for other R&D companies that had a similar pedigree to SRI and Sarnoff, so what you have in those environments are some very smart people, a lot of very smart PHDs, very, very creative, very good with technology and inventing things, but what they typically lack is the ability to translate that into a viable business or take that technology to market and make it successful. A lot of that has to do with timing, because many of these R&D professionals are very early in a market. I worked for a company called BBN, and between BBN and SRI, they actually were the companies that worked with DARPA to develop the internet. BBN (you’re familiar with Cisco I’d say, they make routers and switches and things like that), well, BBN made the first routers and the first switches for the internet. So they actually developed these and had a whole product line to sell these. The problem was that the internet was very immature in the early days, so they were unable to turn it into a viable business because of the lack of universality of the internet. It was only at a few universities, and nobody really understood the usefulness of it, so they were ten years early to the market. They eventually dropped it because they couldn’t make any money off it, and then you have someone like Cisco come in, and they made an entire business out of it, so it’s timing. Market timing is very important. Having the technology is not necessarily everything you need to be successful in a business, you need all the other pieces, and the market and timing the market is an extremely important attribute.

RM: So that experience definitely helped you in regards to your efforts at Front Row Labs?

MC: So again, when you go and look- and now, the COVID virus has changed everything- we are still investing in startup companies, and we’re finding quite a few good startup companies. They’re all working remote, but basically there’s still a lot of energy in the startup and entrepreneur world, and so it’s actually still a very exciting time. COVID has hit some of these startups pretty hard because there are a lot of applications- there’s one for baseball stadiums and football stadiums, and it was to deliver food faster and you could order it on your phone, which is a great idea, but we’re not going to have full stadiums for a very long time. So that killed their whole premise so that’s part of the difficulty when something like this happens is you might have the best idea in the world, but it was a pre-COVID idea. 

RM: You talked about how COVID affected some of the companies that you worked with, but just in general, in a pre-COVID world, what is the main problem that you handle with innovators and entrepreneurs, and how do you help them get through it?

MC: This actually goes back to my experiences with SRI as well, but teaching people with a very good idea, a very good approach, how to describe that and put it in terms that a typical investor and or the public would understand is very hard. You really try to focus the entrepreneurs and the inventors on, “That’s a great idea, it looks really cool, it’s probably the breakthrough technology, but what’s the benefit?” And you try to focus on the need and the benefit, and the approach is the technology and things like that, so you really try to get them to focus on the benefit. If they can really describe the benefit well, and show the benefit in terms of dollars and models and things like that, you can really have some success, and you can get people interested. But if you can’t show the benefit, or you have trouble showing the benefit because you like the technology so much, it makes it very difficult. So that’s probably the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to understand- really being able to show the benefit. 

RM: Part of Front Row Labs’ efforts to help the companies that they work through is the Corporate Innovation Center, so can you walk me through the process of how the Center produces and encourages innovative ideas?

MC: Are you familiar with YCombinator? They were one of the first accelerators, and they would take a cohort of companies in, say they took in ten companies, and they put them through 12 weeks of intensive training. They would teach them how to analyze a market, they would teach them how to describe the benefit as I was saying before, they would teach them how to put together their pitch set, how to describe their technology, and how to project and model with different risks associated with their idea. They would go through a pretty intensive course load and teach them that. Well, that was one of the things we were going to do as well, establish these training programs to really help these small businesses get stood up and really provide some training as well. So, they had some fundamentals, and let me explain some of those fundamentals- one of the most important things for a start-up to do is to go out and try some experiments, and don’t be afraid to fail a little bit. I’m not saying to fail massively, I’m talking about trying to figure out what the consumer, the customer, really wants, and trying out some experiments with that and trying to understand what makes that better, and what we could tweak to make this better. Companies that have done that have been really successful- DropBox, Box- some of these companies have done these experimentations and really come out to be very successful, and so especially in the world of internet, with digital advertising, it makes it much easier to do a lot of experimentation. If you can experiment, and learn from your experience, “This one didn’t work, this one did work and this is why it worked, this one didn’t work”, it really provides some real energy so when they get it right it really does start to click and sell. Those are the kinds of things the training can do, and the other thing that’s important about innovation is that innovation is collaborative. Some of the greatest inventions, and there’s some great books out there on innovation, some of the greatest inventions, and there are some great books out there on innovation, but some of the greatest inventions of humankind have all been a result, the transistor, some of the computer things that have gone on, have all been the result of collaboration, and not necessarily two scientists, two physicists working on the same problem. Sometimes a physicist, a scientist, a mathematician, somebody from the electronics world, can produce outstanding results because of the different perspectives they bring to the problem, so collaboration is an important aspect of innovation. One of the things we always push is to try to put together a team, even if they’re not all from your company and you have to have other people to collaborate together.

RM: As a respected figure in the industry, what are your thoughts on sustainable and responsible innovation?

MC: Well, we absolutely give preference to someone who has a very good idea in sustainability. There’s a lot of ways to look at sustainability. We have looked at a couple of companies in the agriculture world where they could reduce food waste due to the ripening of food waste, and if you could do that, and it’s a terrible number, but probably 30-40% of the produce that’s produced rots and is inedible, so if you could stop that or delay it and make sure it gets to the market in time with the right amount of ripeness, you could save a lot of energy because you wouldn’t have to produce as much, and you could save a lot of hunger obviously. There’s a lot of things you could do with that, so we look at those kinds of things even though they’re not direct, they’re an indirect result, as being very helpful for the environment and to energy sustainability

RM: You were talking about the food waste company that you were working with. Are there any other companies you’re working with that have sustainable initiatives as well?

MC: Well, we’ve looked at some other companies that have some very unique ideas in the battery area. If their technology works, it could really revolutionize the battery industry, so your cellphone could last 10x longer and be half the cost to produce that battery and not be made of hazardous material, the batteries could be built out of materials that were recyclable. So those were the kinds of things that we look at as being very interesting.

RM: What are the three main qualities that you look for in young entrepreneurs when you’re deciding whether to work with or invest in them?

MC: You want to make sure that one: they are really committed and driven to be successful. Entrepreneurship is a very hard path and I’m not sure many entrepreneurs know that, but it is. To get everything right and get the market right is actually a confluence of a lot of good things, so I think that obviously being driven and committed is very important. I also think the entrepreneur really has to understand the market and be able to understand that the market takes a lot of time and effort and a lot of personal interviewing people and talking to customers, and really understanding that, I’d say that is one of the most important things. They absolutely have to understand the market they’re going after and have a good feeling for what is going to sell and what’s not going to sell. I think the third quality is that they feel a responsibility to the vision. They have a vision, but they also feel like the vision is who they are. You almost want them to be the vision, it’s almost the same kind of thing. And it is the team, it’s not just a single entrepreneur, it really is a team, so we do look for, you know, capabilities- if they’re gonna need this, do they have that? And again, that’s why we set up Front Row Labs was to try to fill some of those voids with experienced people to help them through some troubling events.

For more information, visit the website.